Toyota to spend 1.5T yen on EV battery development
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What IS incredible is that Toyota HAD the absolute lead in EV. Their hybrid power trains had everything needed, they literally had power mgmt, battery, electric motors etc.
Then they went absolutely crazy over hydrogen - which I always hated. The cycle is terrible currently (from production to power on road).
The mind boggles a bit to imagine what might have been for them if they had just moved forward on hybrid, plug in hybrid, full EV path. They could have blended that mix more and more until full EV. They had most of the pieces it seems including production capacity.
While Toyota was raking in wheelbarrows of easy cash from moneyed buyers Nissan was selling Altimas for bottom dollar to people who were rolling in negative equity from a Dodge Journey.
This is standard BigCo stuff. You get a lead and you lose that lead because you don't jump hard enough onto the next big thing because you don't want to divert resources over the thing you're currently winning with. IBM, Boeing, Ford, Microsoft, they've all been down this road.
Nissan never had that lead so they had nothing to stop them from going into EVs deep enough to grab a good share of the market.
The Leaf can fast charge and this is now included in all models, but it can only suck down 50KW vs Tesla now being able to draw 100+KW. It also uses ChaDEMO which is a fading standard, though still very common where I live. Apparently there are some converters in the works to let the Leaf charge off CCS and perhaps even the Tesla network in the future, but they'll probably cost hundreds of dollars since apparently a DC fast charge mega-dongle is not trivial.
In other news: there is now a market for dongles for cars. I have seen the future and it has a dongle.
Newer Nissans are supposed to use the CCS standard (if Nissan gets its crap together and actually launches the Arya).
If I’m not mistaken, the idea I believe was that if they settled on and developed hydrogen infrastructure, that would power not just cars, but also heavy machinery, etc that other parts of the Honda/Toyota/Mitsubishi/etc conglomerates could use.
Politicians like hydrogen because if you ignore all the crap to get their (drilling for fossil fuels, separation, energy use in compression, transport, capital costs of building networks etc) you get that picture of water out of a tailpipe. The physics of it remain very poor.
As a point of ref we have relatively clean electricity generation already (hydro, solar, wind, nuclear) depending on what you count.
Any indication how close to production this east china sea resource is? How willing China is to let Japan develop it or is it already well developed? Again - these are often pipe dream type ideas.
I think it has more to do with external independence/isolationism, than about environments theme, carrying over from the century before. I don’t understand why the government just go double down on nuclear fuel cycle concept but maybe there are too much political complications in it.
The prius was AMAZING.
Their other hybrids also great. They had aero down, ev engines down, power management down.
It's so weird to see them fight EV's so hard for so long.
For example, the RAV4 Hybrid has a 1.6KWH battery (and NiMH to boot), the RAV4 Prime (plug-in with 42 miles of EV range) has a 16KWH battery, a similar Model Y has an 75 KWH battery.
Doesn't this answer the question? Batteries were and are still too expensive.
The ideal model, if I had some power/leadership 10 years ago with some foresight would have been:
- add a plug to the Prius for all-electric mode, get the technology to as many carmakers as possible with whatever negotiated means possible.
- push them to increase the all-electric mode to 50 miles
- once tech was doable, impose incentives/requirements/taxation that required all new cars be PHEV. Especially for trucks/SUVs.
- incentivize home charging and start incentivizing gas stations to have plugs as well as a requirement to staying in business
Given the current supply of cobalt, nickel, lithium, etc, the most effective way to electrify consumer transportation is the 50 mile PHEV. It would have electrified 95% of daily trips for those vehicles, and eliminates range anxiety for the longer trips until the infrastructure is done.
With that and Toyota's lead, the plug in hybrid would have provided practical market "EV" leadership probably through 2030. It is mystifying to me why they dragged their feet to add a simple plug to the system. A massive management failure that ceded not only pseudo-EV leadership, but leadership in the hybrid market.
Toyota may be able to coattail the nascent OEM market for EV components and leverage their status as current #1 to keep afloat, but so many companies are far ahead in the vertical integration for the EV. An OEM component EV will be inferior to vertically integrated manufacturers (Tesla currently, VW and probably GM soon).
I'd guess that the OEM model of ICE drivetrains is basically an extreme optimization of a long-running design. Early ICE companies were probably vertically integrated intheir parts/components manufacturing until specific market competition for components between dedicated OEM manufacturers could eventually beat the in-house teams.
But EVs are a MASSIVE revolution in terms of the core components, and designs are innovating/evolving so rapidly that you can't tie yourself to components. Look at Tesla, they are building their own motors, batteries/chemistries, and even minerals extraction pipelines per battery investor day.
OEM ecosystems only exist once a sufficient number of cars are using a component. So an automotive OEM EV motor won't be competitive with Tesla until several generations of EVs go through the market, and a generation for a car is at least 5 years traditionally?
Almost all the car companies annoucing EV programs/funding aside from VW and maybe GM are just doing the OEM model: we'll get some OEM motors and OEM batteries, slap them onto a traditional OEM ICE platform. And boom, the CEO gets to tell major activist shareholders that he isn't being left behind: please don't fire me like you canned the BMW CEO.
Toyota is likely still stuck in OEM mode. They can't maintain leadership with that mentality, the vertical integration model will win for the next two decades at least, even if solid state closes some of the tech gap with Tesla for the main auto people (which is what they are basically all gambling on)
Innovation is cute and everything. But profit is king.
GM likely saw the writing on the wall, people probably weren't willing to pay the full MSRP. Especially when Kia/Hyundai is managing to provide plug-in hybrids for 30k. (As far as quality/fit, I sat in an early Niro Plugin and the interior was something in between the Bolt and a Sonata... but some people care more about price nowadays.)
GM doesn't mind selling a $40k car instead of a $33k car. What matters is volume x margin. You hit on the volume factor. I suggest that GM could have increased their volume dramatically by actually marketing the car. In my opinion they actively discouraged sales. They did not want to sell more of them. I think this points to a margin problem. Every hour of labor and every square foot of production facility given to the Volt was actually hurting GM. Not because the Volt had a negative margin, but because the Volt had a negative _relative_ margin.
If GM layed off every line worker/engineer/artist etc working on the Volt and closed every production facility that manufactured it, GM would have lost money.
But if they repurpose all that into the production of a 1/2-ton truck, they make more money than they do on the Volt.
If they repurpose it all into the production of the Bolt that sells for $40k, they make more money than on the Volt. You can argue that the Volt is 2x or 3x better than the Bolt. But that would be arguing from the wrong perspective. With a little marketing the Bolt should sell as well as the Volt (even at a higher price tag) and provide significantly higher margins. Same volume x higher margin = kill the Volt.
Aside from the battery recall, what's crappy about the Bolt? $36,000 for 250 miles of range and the reviews seem pretty good. That said, I was disappointed that they canceled the Volt.
Bolts are crappy? My wife drives one, and given the cost, I like it more than my Tesla. Before covid pricing, you could pick one up brand new for mid-20s. And they will get back to that level after the bubble pops, because GM is keeping the mediocre range and "fast" charging speeds. For someone who just wants a runabout that can handle pretty much any daily driver scenario, the ROI is unbeatable. That it makes me smile to drive it is a plus.
“GM recalls every Chevy Bolt ever made, blames LG for faulty batteries”
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/08/gm-recalls-every-chevy-...
I think having to recall every Bolt ever made for battery system failure, which is the primary part of the car is “crappy”. The other parts of the car might be fine but the actual battery system has been giving people trouble for years now. That’s why I say it’s no good. The other parts of the car are probably decent. But having to recall every car and swap the battery is a massive failure on GM’s part (and their partner LG).
They don't have what they would need in the battery dept - and the battery is the most important part of an EV. The Prius has a NiMH battery, which has lower energy density than Li-ion and other newer chemistries.
The (non-plugin) Prius can get by with the NiMH battery because the battery is only used for regen braking energy capture and acceleration at low speeds, not for high amounts of energy storage or power output. For those it uses gasoline and the ICE engine.
[0] - https://projectlithium.com/products/prius-lithium-replacemen...
* A subset of fourth-gen Priuses, those equipped with all-wheel drive, went back to NiMH for better cold-weather performance.
The hydrogen distraction is baffling.
Maybe 20kWh would be enough to get it to 90%+ for most people ?
That, in my opinion, is pretty close to problem sorted in terms of decarbonisation of transport. Toyota could have had it in the bag by now.
The original Plug-In Prius is quite different from the Prime[1] though, the original was spun off the Gen 3 Prius, the Prime is even a little farther from the Gen 4.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius_Plug-in_Hybrid#XW...
So imagine if instead of concurrently trying to make hydrogen happen while their side-gig of hybrids managed to completely corner the market, they went all in on electric. It would be a very different car market.
Just like every other car manufacture they couldn't quite put the numbers together on how Battery EV will work without a ridiculous amount of investment or bet. It is worth remembering they are primarily a car manufacture, not battery manufacture. Now things have changed not only because the path is clearer, and numbers are easier to do with less risk, ( big enterprise are risk averse ), but more importantly Investors loves EV. It doesn't matter if you have no concrete plan to make profit out of EV, your stock price will rise, and this has an effect on management, board, banks, cash flow, all sort of things.
Although I am skeptical of Solid State Battery, I would have thought a conservative company like Toyota would have went with conventional Li Battery with Silicon Anode type.
They aren’t as behind as you’d think given that a hybrid still makes more sense than an ev to a lot of people. A reliable hybrid that just works is what people need. More so with their adaptive cruise control.
Could they have done better? Sure. It’s hard to say different given their size and culture.
Also, GM had the EV1 years before …
2021 Toyota Venza/Cargo volume 28.8 ft³, 55.1 ft³ with seat area
The real question would be :
Why aren’t the euro manufacturers building hybrid diesel powertrains? A small modern Diesel engine coupled to an electric motor would certainly provide more mpgs.
- Diesel engines are more complicated than petrol engines. You have a high pressure fuel injection system and turbo(s), which both need significant maintenance approximately every 150,000km. If you don't you'll end up burning excess fuel or oil (that's what happens when you see a diesel vehicle with plumes of black or white smoke under acceleration) which is obviously not good in terms of pollution. If you leave it, eventually your engine will blow up (the turbo will leak oil into the intake air leading to hydrolock, or injectors will put in too much fuel wearing down the cylinder). Compare this to a petrol engine, where maybe you need to replace the spark plugs, and if you don't the worse that could happen is misfires or the engine simply not starting.
- Diesel engines emit a lot more NoX emissions than petrol which needs complicated filters in the exhaust to remove. DPF filters are usually removed after 150,000km because they end up clogged (causing loss of power, higher fuel consumption, and can damage the engine). You can't actually buy new replacements - I don't know why - and 'regeneration' doesn't really work, so they are usually just cut out. In Europe NoX is regulated by the engine class (e.g. Euro 6) when it is manufactured, not during regular emissions checks, so this doesn't cause you to fail that. AdBlue is slightly better, but there are already devices you can plug into cars to disable the system, which many people (and companies) do.
- Diesel engines don't operate well when cold. All modern engines have glow plugs (electric resistance heaters) which heat up the engine block when you turn on the ignition. I imagine this wouldn't work well with a hybrid system where the engine doesn't run as often.
- Diesel engines have a much higher compression than petrol, and use compression to ignite the fuel. This means the cranking power needed to start the engine is a lot higher. For parallel hybrids (like the Prius) this shouldnt be an issue, as the same motors for driving are used to crank the engine, but I imagine it may be more tricky to make that transition smooth compared to petrol. Same when the engine cuts off, as you don't just cut power to the spark plugs to stop it.
- Diesel engines are only usually available in larger sizes because it's not economical to produce a 1.0 litre diesel engine. This would mean a diesel hybrid would be more expensive than a petrol hybrid, and would probably need a larger engine bay.
- Petrol hybrids usually use the Atkinson cycle which is more efficient and provides more torque towards higher RPMs. The electric motor provides the high torque at low RPMs so it works well together. Diesel engines typically provide higher torque at lower RPMs, and need a turbocharger to provide any useful torque at higher RPMs, so it's the opposite of what a parallel hybrid needs. I'm not sure if there are any alternative cycles for diesel engines that would work better for a hybrid.
- After VWs scandal I feel diesel has lost a lot of political clout.
That said, I am jealous of the Audi A2 1.2l 45kW diesel which has a much lower fuel consumption than my Prius :-)
I always loved hydrogen, especially if someone comes up with a better way to generate it. The refueling issue and the chemical disaster with batteries would be solved.
I would be surprised if they solved the battery issues in less than decades
i think there is a speadsheet somewhere inside Toyota where your "nightmarish" - because it cannibalizes significant share of the current revenue from hybrids - scenario is precisely described. The fear of cannibalization of current cash cow (and related internal uphill battle with the top management milking the cow) is frequently the reason behind seemingly obvious blunders by BigCo-s.
(Of course, governments the world over leapt at hydrogen and clung on for dear life because it was the only renewable vehicle tech that preserved the current fuel distribution model and so allowed them to keep supporting road infrastructure with fuel taxes. They saw the legislative advantage, physical efficiency was nothing to do with it.)
Toyota had something special back in the 80s and early 90s and it seems like they lost it. Was there some key innovator high up in the company who retired some time around then?
They're still not serious about EV's.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/09/toyota-finally-gets-ser...
https://electrek.co/2021/03/17/toyota-lobbies-us-government-...
Seems like they're late to the party & know it.
I'm afraid they're going to use their brand power and customer loyalty to drag everyone else down.
It’s one thing not to be the company on a new technology, it’s another not to ramp up production when your selling out month after month.
The relevant data points we have on this are from Tesla. Elon has been beating the "scaling production is the hardest thing" drum. His callouts around the cost of design vs manufacturing are quite interesting.
Now Toyota has been in the at-scale manufacturing game a long time, so perhaps they're just better at this. Either way battery capacity will hold them back for a decade.
The investments we're seeing in batteries (LG, Philips, Tesla, VW) are 10x+ what Toyota is doing. I don't see how this results in Toyota able to ship cars in volume as the transition to electric accelerates.
As to your 10+x comment that’s very true today, but Toyota isn’t selling any EV’s. It’s perfectly reasonable for them to have a conservative adoption curve right now rather than assuming their going to sell 10m EV’s in 8 years and then potentially massively over build capacity. This is especially true if their aiming for true mainstream cars without significant markup to justify more risky investments.
If they aren't serious about EVs, why would they do this? I honestly don't understand Toyota and Honda here. Something is causing them to fight EVs and push for Hydrogen. Patents? Geopolitics? Existing supply chain and manufacturing processes?
Say what you will about Americans, this is not their way. Musk was wrong about the vertical doors and over automation and his team kept screaming at him until he didn't just relent he frequently brings it up in interviews as an area where he messed up.
The flip side is that for years Japanese automotive manufacturers prized engineering graduates as managers and beat the pants off of over financialized leadership at GM and Ford.
You can't respond to sales if you don't have a product that you can sell.
> Assuming they produce a desirable EV they could still ramp up production well past that by 2030.
Sure that goes for every car company. There is no way current plans of Toyota will stand. However they will still be massively behind the curve.
It takes years for the supply chain to develop to build 1 million EVs. Battery factories, lithium production, cobalt mining, cathode/anode production all need to scale and there is increasing competition and very limited human resources.
Its not so easy to 'just' throw up 50GWh of battery output if in 2026 you decide you want more cars 2030.
And if Toyota is last to market with good products and last to realize they need to massively increase production goals it not hard to see how it could be to late.
Toyota has been manufacturing lithium ion car batteries since the 97 Prius, and plug in hybrid since 2012. So, I suspect they can ramp up at least that fast if not faster. Will they is of course a completely different story, they aren’t making great EV’s even if they have the expertise and technology to do so.
Toyota is not producing its own batteries anyway.
And the battery manufacturing plant is not actually the biggest difficulty. The problem is that every battery produce has multiple partners and are already scaling as fast as they can and are already oversubscribed.
The same goes for lithium and other materials producers. The amount of battery factories in planning or being built is outstripping the amount of lithium, graphite projects being in development and the amount of materials production.
Of course you can increase above your initial planning, but for Toyota to remain in the same leadership position it would have to in 2025 say 'we are gone 5-10x' our plans. And that is certainty not easy to do.
Tesla‘s 2021 Model 3’s are still using Panasonic cells. It’s a partnership where Panasonic brings the IP and expertise and the other party brings giant piles of money.
And btw, this is also wrong, Tesla 2021 Model 3 uses different cells depending on where they built and at what trim. They can be from CATL, Panasonic or LG.
Its double wrong in claiming that Modern Tesla is simply using Panasonic cells and they just showed up with money. Tesla and Panasonic built up a lot of expertise together, and the 2170 cells with the specific chemistry being produced in Nevada is cooperation between the companies. The idea that Tesla showed up with money and Panasonic did literally everything is nonsense.
Tesla since then of course has spend many billions investing in internal battery expertise, including supply chain, materials and designing their own cells (their own cathode and anode chemistry) and their own battery manufacturing plant.
So on the one hand you have Toyota buying mostly non-lithium ion cells from Panasonic, on the other you have Tesla who is starting to produce its very own cells from its own factories.
Toyota could ramp up faster because they had the money but over the next 5-10 years you have literally every company trying to do that and being last with the smallest plan is clearly not the position you want to start .
Second that timeline from 2016 to 2018 was Panasonic cells.
To be clear Tesla does employ battery experts directly and invests serious money into R&D, however that’s really just a pile of money for the time period I was talking about without Panasonic. Anyone can try and kick things off from scratch, without the IP and technical expertise from Panasonic Tesla wouldn’t have had those kinds of turnaround times.
As to everyone kicking things off yea, but Toyota is already spending ~10 billion on battery manufacturing over the next 8 years. It’s very different to ramp that up than simply starting from scratch.
I don't think it is a fair comparison. How many of those batteries made it into their vehicles vs their other products?
I don't have exact number but my guess is that of all Tesla consumed batteries 80-90% is far cars.
So even if you take a much more absurdly optimistic assumptions, the announced package for Toyota is only 1-2 million cars. That is 20% of their output in cars today.
https://medium.com/toyotaresearch/carbon-is-our-enemy-lets-u...
https://medium.com/toyotaresearch/more-straight-talk-about-t...
> Maximizing the benefit of every battery cell produced requires that we distribute them smartly.
> This means putting them into a greater number of “right sized” electrified vehicles, including HEVs and PHEVs, instead of placing them all into a fewer number of long-range BEVs, like my model X. This is particularly important because presently it is difficult to recycle the kinds of batteries used in BEVs. If we are to achieve carbon neutrality, we must pay attention to all parts of the “3R” process — Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.
> For example, we hardly ever put gas into our RAV4 Prime PHEV, which has a battery ⅙ as large as our Model X BEV. For the same investment in batteries as our single Model X, five other RAV4 Prime customers could reduce their carbon footprint too.
Of course the main way to improve batteries at this point is to make them cheaper, which comes directly from production scale (look at what happened with solar panels). And even if that wasn't the case, while we wait for improved tech before we scale up battery production, we're continuing to dig up and burn fossil fuels.
This reminds me of some of the propaganda spread by fossil fuel companies decades ago. They position themselves as being on the side of environment, and yet the conclusion is always to delay, do more research, and continue with the status quo.
Tesla batteries are made out of individual cells - pretty much ripe for the Reuse in the 3R process.
Nothing is worse than a blind entourage.
Throwing out the gasoline motor in a full redesign will be great to see (ev mode almost feels sporty already), but in the meantime I’m enjoying my 550mi range on a 10 gallon tank + never using gas on days I don’t leave town.
I'm not a tire expert, but it seems to me that the blowouts of the past were a quality issue and not caused by punctures.
I guess they figure few enough people know what they're doing, feel safe doing it at the side of the road without an emergency vehicle with lights watching out for them, using a janky scissor or bottle jack, and the problems are rare enough that why bother?
And then most peoples' spare tires were never checked so they're underinflated/rotted and unsafe anyway.
In most cases, if I got a flat in a car with a spare, I wouldn't replace it at the roadside with my spare anyway. I'd do.. something else. Get a free tow from AAA to the tire shop (because I'll need to get my tire fixed ANYWAY), get a ride home and get a real jack,... but not use an unsafe trunk kit jack on the side of a freeway.
Other car without a spare, had a flat once in 15 years, it was sitting in my driveway, dealt with it in the usual way.
Other other car without a spare came with runflats but I replaced with "normal" tires. I carry a plug kit and a compressor, and pray?
But normally, AAA or similar. I have roadside through my insurance and also separate AAA coverage. On long trips I try to make sure I have cash to pay local helpers/tow trucks/etc.
The 2021 Tesla Model 3 LR has a pack volumetric energy density of roughly 240Wh/l.
The 2017 Prius Prime has a pack volumetric energy density of roughly 150Wh/l.
So ignoring Toyota's poor battery placement, you could fit ~14kWh in that same space in the Prime using a better pack design with more modern batteries.
If Toyota pulled their heads out of their asses and actually designed a car to be an EV, they could match Tesla's battery pack sizes and still have reasonable trunk space.
I say this as someone who owns two Priuses and do not understand why they didn't capitalize on their advantage to design a decent EV years ago.
The number of Priuses sold per year in the US tells a story of Toyota absolutely failing to capitalize on new technology when they had the lead: https://motorandwheels.com/10-toyota-prius-statistics-facts/
Must hurt them bad having sold those TSLA shares when they were worth a fraction of today’s price.
I hope they bounce back, drop the attitude and become competitive again. They made the mistake of being overconfident without acknowledging the competition or (ex) partners, clean competition is always good. Especially in this segment for our planet’s sake.
Teslas can be only repaired in a professional shop, whereas Toyotas can be fixed by a moderately skilled individual in a private garage. You can order all the parts for Toyota online and do everything from engine rebuild to any kind of maintenance.
Not saying Tesla are not terrible at RTR, they are. But they are also accelerating electrification and catching everybody off guard. Including auto repair shops. Some are actually starting to be the Rossman of teslas and I beleive the momentum RTR is getting will naturally creep in and bite them too soon or later.
For now I can just agree and its one of the reasons I won’t buy a Tesla as I like to keep my cars until they completely die (usually rusted beyond repair with 300kkm+) while keeping my repair costs down.
Toyota was pointed as a major lobyist against right to repair and financed FUD ads in the US on ballot initiatives btw, Tesla was not in that group.
Not a Toyota.
One potential advantage Toyota might have is their use of modular platforms - TNGA-K is used for a sedan, minivan, suv and luxury car, e-TNGA will likely be a similar story.
Patent lifespan is 14-20 years, depending on the type of patent, and which country issued it (there are probably outliers that have longer/shorter time-spans, though most countries now are unified). The question is there anything useful in patents that are expire, but if so there is copying about it.
Most car companies have weird cross licensing agreements (weird in part because there are anti-monopoly laws in place to work around) so to some extent they can.
Literally everybody does that.
https://europe.autonews.com/article/20141103/ANE/141109996/v...
Not only this, but company B is buying fresh new machines that manufacturers have been competing to optimize for at least one tech-generation. They can build new factories optimized for 10x volume, which took the market years to reach and would have been insane ten years earlier.
They can skip compromises in products that were necessary due to immature tech.
Earlier-mover gave tesla brand recognition, but no other lock-in.
~> units '1.5 teraJPY' gigaEUR
* 11.511012Fucking ridiculous.
Same thing for a trillion. I think the first is or maybe was a UK'ism. Maybe the rest of the world does that too?
Trillion means 10^12 in the US but means 10^18 in the above places.
* There is a huge subset of motorized vehicles that are spending a considerable percentage of their daily time on the road. Thinking about taxis, buses, trucks, etc.
* A large percentage of private cars are parked on the streets.
Those two observations alone make the case for electric vehicles slightly problematic.
Of course, a private individual with a garage can get an electric vehicle and use it almost like an ICE one, with a large environmental but also budgetary gain.
But for these other classes of vehicles, hydrogen could provide a better alternative.
Apologies if I'm missing something, but I cannot think what other zero emission technology could give the solution at this point, for these types of vehicle usage.
If there is anything to these new electrolytes and shipping them around to "gas" stations, I think they could end up replacing charging stations for sure.
Model 3 currently has a range up to 353 miles. At 40MPH city driving that's more than 8 hours. Then you need ~20 minutes at a supercharger.
Eventually somebody is going to make an electric SUV with more batteries in it which will then have a >480 mile range when not towing anything, which gets you 12 hours between charges. That's a typical shift for a cab, and they already have the 20 minutes of down time during the shift change to clean the vehicle etc.
Trucks and buses will be the same. They'll fit larger batteries and then get enough range to last the full shift. It also wouldn't be surprising to see cities fit main thoroughfares with overhead lines and then have electric buses with pantographs so they can charge while in motion.
> A large percentage of private cars are parked on the streets.
So as electric vehicles get more common they'll start installing chargers on streets. The more vehicles there are, the more chargers they can justify. The more chargers there are, the more people buy electric vehicles. It doesn't have to go from zero chargers to every urban parking space has a charger overnight, but that's where you end up in a few decades.
These are already a thing but not done because Americans complain about things like wires in the sky and public transportation
Tried in Super Mario Brothers, the movie (1983) [2]
[1] https://insideevs.com/photo/3938111/siemens-to-conduct-ehigh...
There will also be different electric semi tractors. The one with a 500 mile range will weigh more than the one with a 250 mile range. So then you can use the one with the shorter range for the heaviest loads, leaving more of the weight limit for the load. If you weren't transporting it farther than that range then it doesn't matter. If you were then you have to stop to charge more often, which has a time cost, but it's not obvious even in those cases that the extra charging time is going to cost you more than the fuel savings.
The general expectation is that overall costs will go down, because that's the thing causing truckers to buy electric trucks.
Those also often spend the nights in specialized depots or garages. Moreover, lot of those public transport and utility vehicles spend a lot of time idling (think garbage truck or bus at stop) which makes them especially wasteful if ICE.
Around here, bus depots are colocated with tram and train depots so they already have powerful electricity lines.
> * A large percentage of private cars are parked on the streets.
I'm convinced there's a correlation between "parking on the street near condos" and driving relatively little day to day. The cars that drive the most distance would be the ones owned by people living in suburbs or villages. But people with houses can probably charge at home, right?
...
For me specifically, my commute is 15 km one way, so even with something with not much range like Peugeot e-208 I would have to charge it about every two weeks if I'm onsite daily, or about once a month if I'm mostly remote. I'm still not planning to buy one because I'd rather use bike or public transport, but it would work.
There is not enough time/space to explain all the reasons why; it is a very long list of factors working against hydrogen --- and it starts with the fundamental laws of thermodynamics.
The reason hydrogen makes sense for aircraft is the huge advantage of carrying enormously less weight of fuel up to the stratosphere. Add to that, that it will be produced and stored directly at airports from surplus peak electric power, thus obviating need for a great deal of other storage capacity, and of expense extracting, refining, and transporting petroleum.
Its downside is it needs much more space on board, thus new airframes with aerogel-insulated tankage somewhere other than in skinny wings.
We need a government-led initiative to get major airports outfitted with LH2 production and storage systems, to solve the inherent chicken-and-egg problem and get those new airframes into the pipeline. Any extra storage capacity an airport builds out substitutes for storage elsewhere. Airports could afford to get into the load-balancing business in a big way.
https://www.hydrogen.energy.gov/pdfs/review19/arpae11_abbasi...
The last would probably be a consideration mainly for rockets.
Aerogel is both very, very light in weight, and also extremely effective at isolating substances of very different temperatures such as LH2 and aircraft parts. Thus, practical LH2 tanks on aircraft would be insulated with aerogel.
Given a tank of LH2 insulated with aerogel, there would be no need for the tank to be "very strong", as it would not need to hold back any more pressure than the (very light) weight of the column of LH2 contained. Liquified-gas tanks are routinely equipped with fart valves to relieve any pressure that arises from heat leaking in and boiling the contained fluid.
Major obstacles to ammonia fuel include the smell and its corrosiveness. Only a small amount (~12%) of energy is lost converting hydrogen to ammonia, and you save energy by avoiding compression/refrigeration.
Tens of thousands of warehouse-scale refrigeration systems use ammonia as refrigerant. It is the preferred refrigerant in most places besides homes, small offices, and road vehicles.
Liquified ammonia is the odds-on favorite to replace bunker oil in intercontinental shipping, as engines already in place could easily be converted to burn ammonia just by replacing tankage and plumbing, which would not require any structural changes. You need a larger space for the ammonia than for bunker oil, but ships have plenty of room.
Take a look at the current status of stations in CA [1]. Mostly offline, and who knows for how long. A symptom of the entire fuel-cell economy.
The cheapest hydrogen fuel is a byproduct of fracking so that's why it was pushed. It was never sustainable or made sense, obviously.
My mom lives in the suburbs and I see very few Teslas there. Mostly pickup trucks. Cybertruck is not going to appeal to those folks.
There is plenty of time for the incumbents to catch up. Especially when Japan will stand behind their car industry.
EVs are still in the Virtual Reality phase of the adoption curve.
I'm not going to bet against Tesla, but I'd be happy to buy your Toyota shares at a discount.
Heck, the first EV I would look into if I were in the market ATM would be the Chevy Bolt EV/EUV haha.
Long trips are well served by the Super/destination charger network. You'll be surprised how much availability there is: https://www.tesla.com/findus
If you dont drive many miles then todays EVs are already fine for your use case. If you drive a lot then the fuel savings are enough for you to want to make it work.
Battery degradation is not something you should be worried about. It will remain above 85-90% for hundreds of thousands of miles.
Don't forget about depreciation. Gas cars will be worth nothing soon as millions become undesirable. Electric will be so in demand that they'll barely depreciate. Used Model 3s right now are selling for thousands more than a new one.
Long bet: in 10 years you're wrong.
This means that within the decade, EVs will be more convenient and cheaper (already cheaper including lifetime costs).
I have only owned 1 condo, but power meters were right by my deeded parking spot. Would have been very easy to slap a charger in.
Cannot imagine going back to a Toyota after this. The future is now. Just a matter of if Toyota is able to catch up, or if they have missed the train. They had a huge lead with Prius, and so far have squandered it on fuel cell chasing.
iPhone was released in 2007 followed by rapid deployment of infrastructure. I have been streaming Netflix reliably even in a moving car since at least 2016 or 2017. It took less than a decade.
When consumers demand infrastructure, it arrives swiftly.
Tesla is integrating vertically, like mining lithium. Both as hedge against supply disruptions and to squeeze efficiency.
> ...like Apple iPhone destroyed...
Also copying Apple's monopsony playbook. Tesla bought booked the production of "gigacasting" gear. Just like Apple bought all the CNC machines (for making unibody cases) and miniature harddrives (for iPod) and... So competitors can't emulate, even if they wanted to and had the capital.
Convert the hydrogen to methanol and just use that if you really want to use ICE.
Some have announced more then that up to 2025.
The car industry is not the same as the internet. Its not new industry, its a technology shift inside the existing industry.
And plans have to be made 5 years ahead or more, and we know that pretty much every major player is going for EV and most of them have basically stopped working on hydrogen.
The idea that we are are stupid and Toyota is smart ignore all the other companies that together are far larger then Toyota have picked differently. That why I hate the 'oh random guy thinks he knows more then X company'. You literally can not have an opinion without disagreeing with either Toyota or VW.
We see basically no growth in hydrogen vehicles or hydrogen fuel stations, not even announcements of new cars or infrastructure. Building the need infrastructure is a decade long heavy investment project, it doesn't just come out of nowhere.
Anyway, comment quality does vary a lot by subject matter. Industry insiders aren't likely to say anything new in this case, whether because of NDAs or language barriers or disinterest in HN, yet there is broad interest in the direction of automobile development. It's something people here are trying pretty hard to understand themselves, so they often feel they have gained enough insight to share, just as they do with COVID. I'm no sociologist though, this is just a layman's take. :)